Through the pain she saw that storytelling, even about the most personal violation, could both transform the individual and build community.īurke: I look at it as overdue. In her years working with youth, she heard the traumatic stories of girls and women over and over again, and she experienced disillusionment when mentors and civil rights leaders in Selma, Alabama, turned a blind eye to abusers, including onetime Martin Luther King associate Reverend James Bevel, in their midst. She was among them, having suffered multiple attacks by older boys as a young child and also abuse from an intimate partner. She had been using those very words for almost a decade, starting on the first-generation social media networking site MySpace, to foster healing and solidarity among survivors of sexual assault. It was a surreal and scary moment for Burke, who feared being propelled onto the Twitter main stage this way-but equally feared being overshadowed and going uncredited. She urged would-be tweeters to include the words “me too” in their posts. Maybe then, Milano reasoned, the world would understand the magnitude of the issue. When she roused herself and checked the phone, she saw that actor Alyssa Milano had encouraged women to tweet about their experiences of sexual harassment and violence. Early one October morning in 2017, activist and writer Tarana Burke woke to the sound of her phone buzzing and rumbling incessantly.
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